If you haven’t seen The Batman yet and you’d like to watch it without two giant men spoiling it for you, we recommend skipping the first five minutes of this episode. Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, what did you think of The Batman, the film starring Robert Pattinson? I thought it was good, but just good. You big into Batman fighting in cells in a flooding sports arena, or whatever the fuck was going on at the end of that film? Suddenly felt like it needed this big action beat where it had been quite low-key. Like it didn’t really know how to finish a low-key Batman story in a low-key way. So when it changed, it was a bit daft. Also arguably the villain one in that film, despite what the film may tell you, I think he caused enough damage for it to be like one nil to him. Yeah, like mild spoiler alert here. So skip ahead if you’ve not seen it yet, but that guy does do a lot of damage to that city. Like so much damage, like millions worth of damage. It’s not like in Batman Begins where, you know, Bruce Wayne manages to stop the train with Ra’s al Ghul in it. All he really does is destroy a train network and it’s fine. Here, it’s like, yeah, that city’s a bit fucked. So did you win, Batman? I mean, what are we all doing here really? But hey, yeah. I must admit, I was quite disappointed by it. I’ve not been too vocal about it on social media because I get the impression everyone loves it except for me. I only really love how it looks, but I think as a Batman story, it feels fairly familiar. I like the Riddler stuff, but then they forget about it for most of our two. And then the Riddler’s motivation in that film is just stupid. They couldn’t think of anything good for him to actually be motivated by. So that was disappointing. But do you have any more detailed thoughts on those subjects, Matthew? I found it very long and very slow, and there were too many scenes of Batman and Gordon whispering to each other, and they both had quite hushed, gruff voices. So those scenes sonically were not very interesting to listen to. A lot of people have said, well, this is the one which kind of does it as a detective film. And that’s true, but unfortunately, that drags it into the realms of detective stories of which I’m quite into and quite hot on. And I just found the whole kind of plot and the whole conspiracy quite boring and obvious. Like if you’ve read any kind of hard-boiled crime novel, it just seems so tropey. And maybe you’re like, well, it’s a good detective film for a Batman story. And you’re like, yeah, maybe, but I’ve got a pretty exacting standards in that particular genre. So on the kind of like ranking of Matthew Castle’s favorite mysteries, this is below Danganronpa, right? It ain’t no Danganronpa. It’s not even Apollo Justice. What about Miles Edgeworth? Is it better than Miles Edgeworth’s one? Oh, amazing. That’s what our listers are really here for. They were kind of dozing off at our Batman chat, but now they’ve all perked up because the visual novels chat has come out. Yeah, we’re gonna do a granular Batman Ace Attorney ranking. They must admit, some people afterwards were asking me, oh, Samuel, what are some good detective-based graphic novels of Batman? And the truth is, even though he’s called the world’s greatest detective, he doesn’t do that much detecting. A lot of Batman stories are mostly him being a sort of action hero with themed villains, I would say, and less about the actual act of detecting things. The Long Halloween is probably the most famous one because it’s got a year-long mystery and a good resolution. But I don’t know, if you look at a lot of, and Hush is another one that’s got a kind of mystery at its core, but if you look at most of them, they’re kind of just like him going from A to B and sort of doing stuff. Those are the Batman stories. He’s not really, they’re not really famed for being amazing detective stories, I would say. The Batman comics, even the best ones. So yeah, that’s Big Sammy’s big take on Batman as a detective. And it’s an exclusive podcast take. We haven’t really heard that out in the Twitter world yet. No, that’s content I’ve reserved specifically for you, the listeners. Mostly because my takes on the Batman will be so unpopular on social media, they can’t really be aired. I’m like, I think this is a borderline two-star film and everyone’s like, absolutely go to hell. And I’m like, fair enough, fair enough. So I could just keep it on here where I feel like I’m on safer ground. So Matthew, we made it to episode 70, the Big 7-0. Go us, that’s what you put in your podcast plan here. But I agree, 70 episodes is a lot, isn’t it? Hell of a lot. So this episode is a What We’ve Been Playing episode. We said we do these more regularly this year. That’s partly to allow us the space to do more stuff with Patreon, but also people enjoy these episodes, they always do well. We tend to do them when we’ve got a big game to talk about, and that is exactly what we have this week. Matthew has been playing Ghostwire Tokyo, which I think is out the day that this podcast goes live. So like Dying Light 2, we’ve got some nice kind of chunky impressions of that. Chunky impressions. This is the kind of Gold Ace they put on the PC Gamer covers. And we’ve got a bunch of other stuff to talk about too. I’ve been playing Tunic, the new Zelda slash Dark Souls kind of like game where you play a little fox lad. That dropped on game pass day one. That was like a kind of like a launch that came out of nowhere this week, surprise launch, very exciting. So I’ll talk about that. And then we’ve got some other cool bits too. Matthew’s also got the new Kirby game to discuss, Kirby and the Forgotten Land. So Matthew, why don’t we start with Ghostwire Tokyo? What’s the deal? Because in the background, you’ve been saying to me this is kind of a seven out of 10. Obviously, we’re big McCarmy heads on this podcast. Why is it not kind of like landed for you like as much as maybe you hoped? I think the main thing is that this is Tango Gameworks first properly open world game. And that’s quite a different place for this studio to be working in. And the thing I think you have to be careful with is not just attributing everything in this game to McCarmy because I think the messaging around this game has been, this is the new generation or this is McCarmy saying, you know, I wanted a younger generation of directors to really kind of take the reins on this. And I’ve stepped aside in many ways. He talked about that in the Archipel documentary. That’s been the kind of messaging through a lot of the big previews and interviews I’ve read. You know, they’ve really pushed the, it’s terrible, I’ve completely forgotten the director’s name, but they’ve really pushed him to the fore as like the spokesperson for it. And so I don’t think they want you to kind of necessarily be putting it in with the other Mikami games, which is probably the right thing to do because it is very different because I say the defining feature of those Mikami games is that he is a master of pacing. You know, he builds these incredible rides and he kind of rips you through them. And he largely does that by playing in a linear space. And that’s kind of what he is the master of. So this is not a form he has like proven himself in. You know, the top line is, I think it’s an open world game that doesn’t ever really justify itself as an open world game. It’s the classic problem of big, gorgeous, interesting map, but just not a lot of interesting activities to put in it. In fact, the game is at its best in linear sections when you go into like interiors and there’s like weird stuff happening and they can play with the art and they can kind of control the experience a bit more and do more sort of hallucinatory moments where floors are flipping and weird, spooky stuff’s happening. And it can’t really control the city in the same way. Like, I suppose to dig into, to one thing I was kind of curious about is, what are you doing moment to moment in this? Cause the combat sort of looked like you were doing spell style stuff against kind of like ghostly figures around this quite authentic looking Tokyo setting. Is that kind of what it is? Are they kind of Bioshock-y powers? That’s what I kind of got the sense of. They’re a little bit like the powers in Bioshock. What’s weird about the combat is you only really have three attacks for the duration of the game. And you get them probably in the first couple of hours. So you have like a wind attack, a fire attack and a water attack. And the combat is, it’s about lots of enemies basically swarming you from every angle. And you’re trying to kind of crowd control using these three different moves you have. They run out quite quickly. So to kind of regenerate them, you have to kind of pull cores from the ghosts but you sort of whittle them down, expose their core and then pull it out. And that kills them for good and gives you a few bullets back. So it’s got a little bit of the kind of the new Doom kind of ammo control as well. Where you’ve got to play quite aggressively to kind of fuel your ammo and keep yourself going. Like it’s quite easy, especially early on to sort of botch it and panic and basically run out of ammo and then be kind of scrabbling around trying to get ammo from wherever. So it’s quite up close and personal for a projectile based game. It’s never a survival element. You’re never that pushed for ammo that you’re kind of like scared but there is a sort of slight panicked element to it. It’s not just, you know, you’re ripping through stuff with amazing machine guns. It’s trying to keep you in a place where you’re a bit more on edge, which is a McCarneyist trope. Like, I wouldn’t actually say it’s as combat heavy as some of the things they’ve shown off. It’s quite easy to kill monsters in an area and then that area will feel pretty chill and relaxed for like 10, 15 minutes and you can have long stretches where you are just exploring. And that’s the other half of the game, which is quite weird where there’s basically 240,000 souls to collect in this city. That collectathon is kind of the meat of the game. Because of that, it has this very like sedate sort of exploration side to it, which I don’t think any of the promotion really captures. Hmm, interesting. I do like the point you made earlier about how this is like the next generation of Mikami’s kind of like disciples, essentially, who he’s been working with at Tango Gameworks. And like the marketing materials did a really good job of leading into that when they did that state of play. It had a really interesting kind of character for him going around interviewing his team kind of thing. So it doesn’t surprise me too much that the game is quite a radical departure from stuff they’ve made in the past. What I would ask is, even though you say it doesn’t quite justify being an open world game, do you think that the open world is at least superficially nice as a giant weeb man who likes Japan stuff? If you’ve been to Tokyo, if you’ve wanted to go to Tokyo, if you love exploring the Yakuza games and just soaking up that atmosphere, it ticks a lot of those same boxes. I mean, it’s like a weird version of Tokyo because everyone’s dead, obviously, or everyone’s been like vanished and turned into a ghost. That isn’t a spoiler, that happens right at the start of the game. So it’s like, if a Yakuza map you literally like removed all the NPCs, that’s kind of the vibe of it. But it still sounds right because it’s sort of set like moments after this vanishing. So it’s a bit like The Leftovers, if you’ve ever seen that. That’s a show about a load of people who basically get raptured. And it has these awesome scenes where suddenly people go and there’s like a dog on a leash running away or like a car’s crashed because the driver’s vanished. It has kind of Big Leftovers energy. Without all the weird sad, sad cop stuff. Sorry, but Matthew, Big Leftovers energy is like way beyond parody, even for us. Like Big Leftovers energy as a statement on this podcast. That’s amazing. Sorry. Please carry on. No, but that’s the side of the game I like the most. All the shops you walk by, you can kind of hear the music piping out of them. Like they’ve still got their sound systems playing. So there’s still like jazz coming out of the cool looking cafes and thumping kind of J-pop coming out of, you know, clubs and there are convenience stores with music and stuff. So it despite being completely devoid of life, there’s this quite interesting echo of life in it, which I think is like probably the game’s biggest success. You know, it sort of starts in Shibuya Scramble, like the most iconic kind of probably like cliched place you could possibly start, which means it then pushes into like areas you don’t know as well with some quite weird stuff like it gets actually gets into sort of suburbs quite a bit, which I really liked because there you suddenly shift from all these skyscrapers to very like low roofs and like gardens and it’s got it’s got a very different vibe there. And you know, if you watch a lot of like domestic like dramas set in Japan, it’s quite nice to be able to explore those kind of locations too for once. Things which would probably be a bit too boring for a Yakuza game, you know, there’s a there’s like a region which is based on I think they were like post-war dormitories they built, but they’ve got like an extremely cursed energy. Like I think they’re abandoned now. They’re the kind of things that, you know, you get those websites that are dedicated to exploring abandoned buildings, and they kind of go in and they’re all like being reclaimed by nature and all that kind of stuff. There’s a sort of region built on these sort of famously abandoned, sort of cursed dormitories, which really fits the kind of spooky kind of urban legend direction they’re kind of taking in the game, it feels like super authentic, you know, if any part of this game is a triumph, it’s that. Hmm, interesting. I really flip-flop on it. At the time of doing this, I haven’t written my final review. Some of it really speaks to me, like that city stuff, but I’m also just sort of surprised that something associated with the Kami is so kind of loose in a way. It does also sound like, even though, you know, you said on last week’s episode I think that you compared it to something like Far Cry, it doesn’t sound like there’s exactly an open world type of game that this matches. Like it still sounds like, even if you just take the choice of setting, kind of like the choice of enemies, it doesn’t seem like it’s, you know, by the numbers, by the numbers in always, you know what I mean? There are a lot of side activities that are repeated that are very bad, I would say. Like there’s, but they’re dressed up as like interesting ghosts, but they’re actually quite dull. So, for example, there’s this like fox demon, and they’re like, you know, this fox demon, when you meet it, it will like try and escape. And it’s basically just chasing like, you know, those floating pages in Assassin’s Creed. You just chase this fox demon for like 20 meters and then you catch it. Or they’re like, oh, there’s this aerial ghost that you can never catch. And it’s just a ghost that you chase across rooftops for like 20 seconds. The actual side activity is some of the most boring I’ve played in an open world game. There is an art to filling a map with crap. The crap in this game has this like ghost skin on it. But it’s really, really underwhelming to the point where you’re like, oh, what is that thing? Oh, it’s, you know, it’s the bit where I talk to a ghost in a tree and then a load of people attack and I have to defend the tree against three waves. And you do that like in 10 different places or it’s the bit where it’s the ghost with the long neck and I have to chase its weird head around the buildings. And you know, when you say like, oh, there’s a ghost with a long neck and you have to chase its snaking neck, you’re like, oh, that sounds interesting. But actually in the doing, it is just, you know, you’re just following a map marker basically. It’s that stuff feels quite underpowered. What about the story itself then and these more sculpted kind of like side missions? Like what does that stuff feel a bit less kind of like familiar? I wouldn’t say Mikami’s games are necessary. Like I wouldn’t say any of them story is the strong point. Like even Resident Evil 4, it’s just a naff thing to kind of enable a lot of action to happen. I couldn’t even tell you some of the characters names. They’re really like underwritten, badly written, flat. That did nothing for me. The side missions, they’re set up really well because each one is like a ghost, it’s like I say it’s based on this like anecdotal stuff, so they’re like, you know, there’s a house where, you know, at night people hear piano music coming out of it and you’re like, oh, that’s interesting. And so you’re listening out for a house that plays piano music and you start hearing like the eerie strains of like Moonlight Sonata and you go into the house and there’s no one in there and you’re kind of creeping around and the set up for them, you’re always like, oh, I’m going to find an interesting ghost. But then I would say nine times out of ten, the side missions end with like a fight against one of the regular enemy types. Like there are very few bespoke monsters and bespoke ghosts, which I actually found quite disappointing because they’re like, oh, the legend is there’s this particular demon that lives in the bath house and you’re like, oh, is it going to be some kind of water demon or whatever? And it just sort of whisks you to a self-contained arena and then you just fight waves of the regular enemies. You’re like, oh, you got me all excited. It gets you excited over and over again for not a lot, which is the problem with the side stuff. But the framing is good. Like it gets you excited. But then by the end, you know, not to get too excited, you’re like, oh, all right, well, this is going to be, this is either going to be a wave of small enemies or you’re going to make me fight like one of the boss characters as a mini boss again. And it’s not going to really resemble the thing you promised. Like, one thing the Evil Within 2 did really well is in its side missions, they had lots of like bespoke, horrible things. So it felt as premium and and as exciting, like as the main game. Like there was a reason to find everything there was just because it was all of such a high quality where here it’s not quite the same. Right. Yeah. Interesting. So I feel like I’m just shitting on Tokyo Ghostwire. There are like a couple of moments where it does tap into that, that weird, like spooky magic. You know, there’s these big kind of ghostly parades which appear in Shibuya Scramble and like march through and you can either kind of go and fight a load of them or you can just watch it. And it’s genuinely very like spooky and otherworldly when it happens or there’s this, there’s one enemy type that when they appear, they make like all the road markings like detach from the road like paper. All right. They sort of ripple. So you’re walking down the street and then all of a sudden like all the white, you know, the double yellow lines start rippling and you’re like, oh, what’s going on? If the whole open world had been like this, like an open world that’s just constantly misbehaving and all this like weird stuff is happening the whole time, this could be like genuinely amazing. But you only really remember those moments because they happen so few and far between that you can kind of go, these were the five cool things that happened in an open world. Well, that was my last question for you on this one, Matthew, which was, is this a scary game? Because it’s hard to tell from the trailers because it’s so action oriented. I was wondering, you know, how scary does it get? I was saying at times, like it’s almost closest to like Luigi’s Mansion because the ghosts are quite cartoonish. You know, they’re like salary men with umbrellas and school little school girls with no heads. There are a couple of things, there are a couple of enemy types, like the first time they turn up, you’re like, ah, this is horrible. Like this is lady with big scissors, which is a bit full on. But even that, like after a few times, you’re like, well, you know, that’s the thing I I saved my rocket, you know, grenade energy for. And I just fire like five grenades into its face and then that’s jobs are good. Maybe for like a younger gamer, it might be a good gateway into like spookier games. You know, I actually have a feeling this could be their most successful game ever. It’s a lot more accessible, like both on difficulty fronts and in terms of tone than Evil Within, because Evil Within, I’d say, is quite hard going as a, you know, tonally, it’s pretty full on and nasty, where this is like not bad at all. This feels like an attempt to make something a lot more mainstream than Evil Within. Yeah, it’s fine. It’s interesting. I tell you what, Bethesda games always come down in the sales. This will be a brilliant £20 purchase, or wait for it on Game Pass when it comes out on Xbox in like a year or whenever it is. Okay, well, if you’re a teenager, you might find this scary. I don’t. Goodbye. Matthew Castle. Yeah, very good. Okay, cool. So, yeah, I definitely still want to play it because it’s just, you know, it’s a blockbuster I can play on my PS5. It looks like the setting alone does make me interested for sure. I imagine me and my partner will be able to play this past the pad quite nicely. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Should be good for that. There’s so little going on. It’s quite easy to pick up. It’s not a game you’d ever lose yourself in either, you know. Maybe that’s a plus point that you could probably see like everything it has in about 25 hours. That’s good. Which for an open world game, it’s quite pacey. That’s good. Well, it should be scarier than the last game we played together, which is Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. Oh, it’s definitely scarier than that. That’s good. That’s reassuring. So I guess I’ll talk about my first game then, Matthew, which is Tunic. So I started playing this on Thursday night. I intended to play one hour of it and then move on to playing another game. And I instead played it for four hours in a row. It took up my entire night and then I played another hour of it last night, but I was far too tired to do the dodge roll properly and threw a tantrum and turned it off. So I played it for five hours basically. And yeah, so as explained, this is a finchie published game about this little fox dude. It’s best described as a mix of Zelda and Dark Souls, slightly more of a leaning towards the Zelda side. It’s kind of like a 2D Zelda, I should say more specifically, isometric kind of point of view. You kind of wake up on the coast of this place and then a very Zelda like locale and then you kind of make your way inland, you have no weapons or anything. So you find a stick, you pick that up and it does a moderate amount of damage to enemies so you can just about fend for yourself. And then you basically just then spend about 25 minutes trying to get hold of a sword, which is a fraught activity. And it’s about figuring out when do you take on an enemy, when do you run away, that sort of thing. That’s where it becomes a bit more Dark Souls-y because you’re always a little bit underpowered in this game instead of the old fires in Dark Souls or whatever they’re called in Elden Ring. You just go to these kind of fox statues where there’s like a little flame and those are your kind of like respawn points. And once enemies are dead on one run, they won’t come back. But then when you respawn, they do come back. So very pervasive, Dark Souls-y thing. And you lose a little bit of currency when you die, not too much, but it gives you another reason to go find your body, basically, and retrieve the stuff that you lost. So it’s interesting because I kind of wondered if there was much more like a 2D style Zelda game. I thought I could even kind of get out of it these days, but it’s so beautifully done. Like it looks amazing. This kind of diorama-y 3D art style kind of looks like it was just sort of made out of like, you know, made as sort of by an animation studio or something, you know, like an Ardmody thing. Like you can see it being made in real life basically out of kind of like real life materials. So it just looks fantastic. I would say that like the real magic of this game is not the kind of rifts on familiar things like Zelda and Dark Souls. It’s about how information is passed to you as a player. And I say this because it’s quite opaque, a bit like how Elden Ring is opaque. But the way it gives information to you is throughout the world, you’ll find these pages of what are basically the instruction manual for the game. And this is designed to kind of riff on old SNES and NES kind of Japanese manuals for games, like there’s little illustrations in them, little button prompts, but there’s a load of text in them that you don’t understand because it’s the in-world language of the game. So you don’t actually know what the text says all the time. And it gives you kind of visual hints, some bits, it has some bits of English, it has some illustrations, it’ll give you enough to kind of go on. And you basically don’t have like an in-game map or anything like that. You have to use all the information gathered in this manual in order to figure out where to go next and what to do. Or you just do it through blind exploration, which can be quite tricky. So I think that’s a really interesting design choice. It makes discovery just so, so exciting. Do you translate the instruction manual? So I don’t know if you do. It gives you scraps of English. There are definitely times where you understand what it is it’s telling you to do. It’ll give you one map of the location you’re in now and say, this path goes to East Forest or this path goes to West Forest. And it will give you enough to go on. But so far, at least, there have been big passages of it I haven’t translated. It’s quite interesting how it does that. Was this on your radar much, Matthew? I played the demo of it. I don’t think any of that instruction manual thing was in it. I thought it seemed surprisingly difficult. I don’t think I had a read on it being a little bit dark, so was he back then. I was surprised by how much he kicked my ass and threw me back. So yeah, but it felt more like a vertical slice than, say, the finished game because this stuff you’re saying about this hidden code to the world or whatever, none of that was in it, I don’t think. And that sounds super interesting. There’s one achievement I unlocked where I did something really hyper-specific in the game. And the achievement said, you understood the left-hand column in page 16 of the manual. And that was obviously, there was something that they were alluding to that you as a player had to figure out. And I’d actually just done it by chance, but that’s an example of something where, an example of how the in-game manual connects to the actual game world and the experience of playing through the game world. It’s a really interesting approach versus telling people what to do all the time. And I feel it’s like, I wonder if we’re entering this kind of phase now of like less handholdy game design, maybe in a kind of backlash to a lot of AAA blockbusters that do just tell you where to go all the time with endless map markers. That sounds a little bit like, like Fez or The Witness. Right, right. You know, sort of things where there’s like a, like a hidden element that it’s trying to kind of convey to you somehow, but never explicitly. I would say that’s probably, probably an apt comparison, having had limited experience with both those games, but I have played them and I kind of know what you’re alluding to. But yeah, I would say that’s probably fair enough. I think it just really gives it this enhanced layer, because when I first saw it, I did just think of it as the cute fox game. Like my partner was really interested in it based on the visuals and I was like, oh, that looks cute. And then, yeah, like you, I heard it was quite tricky. And then I was kind of struggling to get a read on it, but then it dropped and it got these glowing reviews. And so way more acclaimed than I thought. I guess it just, I just thought it would be like a fine game that would come out and be like, oh yeah, that was nice. And then we kind of move on. But I do think it might be a masterpiece. Oh, right. Oh, wow. Yeah, from what I’ve played so far, I’m really, really impressed by it because I think like the way it remixes bits of like how 2D Zelda works is really interesting. So I don’t have a shield yet. I’ve been playing for hours. Oh, really? Yeah, I know how to get the shield, but there’s an absolute fucker enemy guarding this key that opens this house that where the shield is, I’m pretty sure. And I have like, I’ve struggled to kind of like perfectly understand the kind of like dodge window invisibility window basically. So when this enemy with a giant spear attacks me, I’m just like struggling not to get like one shot by him. And so it’s funny, cause I’ve made quite a lot of progress elsewhere. I’ve got like a lot of different items. I’ve got like a magic rod that fires spells, which I feel like I’m not supposed to have before I have the shield. Because the game has this looser structure, seemingly, at least where I am now, it just means that you can kind of miss things quite easily if you’re not paying attention. And so I saw people tweeting about, oh yeah, we’re an hour in now and I’ve got the shield and the sword. And I was like, well, I got the sword, but the shield’s an absolute motherfucker. So I find that quite interesting that like something you rely on is so basic in Zelda, is just like, you know, you have to earn it here. Like I quite like that as an approach, you know? It almost sounds a bit like what like Nintendo is trying to go for with the Link to the Past sequel. What’s it called? A Link Between Worlds. Yeah. That’s something that’s like the whole world’s at your disposal. And it’s very freeform within that, in theory. Yeah, for sure. But a more sort of successful or maybe like bolder version of that. That isn’t because the thing with Nintendo is they fundamentally want you to get through it and have a good time. So they’ll inevitably come a moment where they basically push you towards something or give you something outright. But the idea of a game that doesn’t do that within a similar space, that’s super, super cool. Yeah, it doesn’t really have those gentle touches, which is funny because it might seem counter to like how it’s presented visually. But it is quite like, it is quite enigmatic. It’s like it doesn’t have any kind of in-game text that tells you the story. Like the manual tells you a little bit about who your character is, but not much. And then there’s little kind of dialogue-free cut scene bits that tell you more about your character and why he’s on this location that I assume is an island. It feels a bit Link’s Awakening-like in some respects, I would say, in terms of like how when you start, like the map seems to be going up and up and up, like more and more of a raised surface, which reminds me of, you know, the island in Link’s Awakening. There are certainly like bits of the world you can’t reach early on because they’re dependent on different powers. I can see different types of blocks that I can’t use yet, but I imagine you could if you had a certain jump ability or, yeah, like that kind of thing. So you can see the kind of, you can see where you could later return to a location in that Zelda-y way and get somewhere new. But it’s, I think it’s just a fact that the critical path is not that obvious to you, that it does come down to you as a player to figure out exactly where to go and what to do. And that the manual is such a crucial piece of information, such a crucial piece of how you play. That I think it’s just a really good way to catch the feeling of discovery and learning in a game. Like it’s just, yeah, it’s bold, but it works really, really well. So. That sounds great. It is, I think it’s legit. I think it’s like amazing. I really like, it’s not very often that I’ll just play four hours of a game in a row like that, but yeah, it is so, so good. And it looks fantastic. The music is amazing as well. Music weirdly a bit more Final Fantasy-like to me, but. Right. In the demo that I played, there was definitely like a Dark Soulsy currency that you lost on death. Yeah. What’s all that about? Is that like, is that actually a crucial part? Cause I never really got worked out what that was for. This is another really interesting thing, right? So I had these, well, where to start? So I’ve been collecting this currency, like you say, you gather quite a lot of it. If you die, I think you lose around 30 of it or something like that. Maybe the amount varies depending on what enemy kills you, but you don’t lose all of your money. You just lose some of it, which is preferred to me, because otherwise it’s a faff and you can sometimes die in some nightmarish locations. So retrieving your money is not that easy. In terms of what you can spend it on, right? So there’s a lot of hidden passageways in this game. Like, because it’s isometric, you’ll see like a little corner that sort of juts off and you’ll go around a corner and hey, if you go down that corner, you go along this long dark path and at the end of it, there is this vendor, this kind of giant, weird, ghostly fox thing that’s like, do you want to buy some bombs or whatever? And so that’s one way you can spend your money. But the other is, it has, in terms of like the manual and how the information is presented to you as a player or even just like how you as a player can experiment. Because the menus don’t tell you everything either. It’s got a lot of this kind of like fictional language in it. You’ll see items where you don’t know what the use is. And I was next to one of the save points and I clicked on this. There’s like a right-hand pane of items. I didn’t know what they did. I just clicked on them. And like a little kind of like money cost came up and I spent it and then I got like extra HP off the back of it. So that’s obviously the upgrade system. And you as a player have to work out how your own upgrade system works essentially, which is really interesting itself. So I spent a load of gold, like upgrading my health and I think my stamina as well. So yeah, that’s the kind of stuff you can spend your money on basically. But it’s just, it’s not like there’s like one, a place called shop and you just go there and buy arrows, bombs or have a little go, try to catch a little Yoshi doll. It’s not that kind of currency. But yeah, yeah, quite interesting. I don’t know if that sounds like your sort of thing or whether it would just annoy you, but yeah. Yeah, it does. I mean, I read Chris Donlan’s glowing Eurogamer review where he gave it an essential. And the only thing that kind of slightly kind of was like, is this entirely for me? Whereas, you know, he was like, oh, it’s like the best Zelda linked to the past. And I was like, okay, if it’s really speaking more to the kind of the retro Zelda-y heads, because you know how I feel about, you know, I’m not as super into the top down Zeldas anymore. Like I’ve kind of, you know, I’m much more into the sort of 3D stuff. I thought, well, maybe this is speaking, you know, purely on a nostalgia kind of note, but it actually sounds like it’s doing some pretty forward thinking or certainly different thinking approaches to some quite well trodden ground. So yeah, I’ve got to give this a go. Yeah, for sure. I thought that, like you, I thought, I’ve kind of had my sort of like feel of 2D Zeldary games now. There’s a few riffs on them out there, but this is like a much fresher perspective. If anything, I’m more down on the Dark Souls stuff. I’m like, I was kind of actually, I sat there and I was like, I cannot believe just how much Dark Souls has influenced everything in games. It’s just everywhere. Even in this cute little fox game. If this was a game made in a world without Dark Souls, you would imagine the game looks quite different. But that’s the stuff. I’m slightly more down on that because sometimes I’m like, ah, I’m back in this location. I have to go over there and get this. That sort of thing I’m not as into. But as a completely fresh take on Zelda, like I say, the thing that I get most excited about is the way information is shared to you as a player or how you’re encouraged to figure out how to do it yourself and how you can be rewarded for that or punished for it. And I think that’s just really interesting, a contemporary approach to this kind of well-trodden ground, like you say. So yeah, Tunic, Matthew, very good. That sounds great. And just on Game Pass, you just go play it for your eight quid a month or whatever. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Uncle Microsoft. So what’s your next game, Matthew? Talk a little bit about Kirby. Yeah. I think we still plan to do a Kirby episode. I don’t want to blow it wide open. This is like a long gestating Matthew Castle project, this. This is like the Napoleon film that Kubrick didn’t make. It’s like, it’s, you know, Matthew’s White Whale. He will do a Kirby episode, but it’s just been pushed back a couple of times. Yeah, there will be a Kirby episode. Well, I’m, you know, from the perspective of that, I’m kind of late coming to Kirby, or I didn’t really appreciate it when I was younger, which is ironic because it’s arguably the younger person’s platformer. And now I kind of enjoy the sort of madness behind it. So yeah, this is the 3D new Kirby for Switch, Kirby and the Forgotten Land. I think it’s called, I keep getting its name confused. Really, the big question, I think, with any Kirby game is like a question of escalation. Like they’re very simple games, but within that, they tend to go sort of batshit crazy, both in terms of story and in terms of like powers, like the powers get bigger and bigger. The sort of power, you know, Kirby’s not really interested in kind of difficulty curve. It just gets more and more hyper as each game goes on and then ends sort of spectacularly. And really the question I’m interested in with any new Kirby game is just like, how does it sort of adhere to that? Does it grow sufficiently? And this one actually does a pretty good job of it. I mean, there’s sort of two sides to it. You’ve got these possessions where Kirby stretches himself over objects, which everyone’s obviously memeing away because the Kirby becomes a car and all that. And those things are sort of fine. There’s only a handful of those transformations. And once you’ve seen them once, you’ve kind of seen what they can do. And they’re kind of wheeled out a couple of times in slightly madder levels and things. But I would actually say what’s more interesting is the base kind of Kirby transformations, the kind of copy abilities, which is where you suck in enemies and take their powers. Because those each have like various upgrades where you kind of like redesign them into more powerful versions. You know, they transform like once and you’re like, oh, that’s cool. Like every single one of these has got like a hyper version, which is a bit crazier. But then it kind of goes beyond that. And it’s that escalation that I really, really like in this game. So like just from an art design, it takes these abilities and just keeps making them bigger and bigger and keeps adding like weird wrinkles to them. So by the end, they’re actually quite, I wouldn’t say they’re complicated, but they’ve got like deeper movesets than they first appear. And that’s super satisfying, like seeing these kind of mad quirks emerge out of it. And like from an art perspective, you know, what starts as a simple sword attack and then it sort of gets turned into like a giant sword. And then there’s some other kind of hidden unlockable stuff. This game’s a bit of a fucking nightmare to talk about because of like embargoes and NDAs. I know the game’s out, but like you don’t want to sort of spoil all the good stuff. And because of that escalation, the good stuff is like all at the end. Okay, interesting. Yeah, I suppose the challenge aspect is kind of something I’ve always kind of thought about with Kirby is like, oh, does this make it a bit too soft? But the level of imagination shown in all the marketing materials, like all the trailers and stuff, makes it seem like it’s got that almost Mario-like level of kind of like, oh, look at this crazy stuff and amazing, interesting level design. Does it? No, it’s not quite there. Like the actual, the levels themselves are quite basic platforming challenges. You know, it’s like slow moving platforms and spike pits and, you know, spiky rollers you have to jump over. You know, it’s kind of quite familiar Kirby fare and what’s interesting is that it’s in 3D. I wouldn’t say like the levels get too crazy, though the end game content is quite good in this game. Like there is a sort of hidden tier of slightly madder stuff where you’re like, oh, I’d play a whole game of this. You know, a bit like how in a Mario 3D world, like you do all the levels and then there’s like another campaign which kind of remixes everything into kind of, and that’s where it kind of bears its teeth a bit more. Like there’s sort of a Kirby version of that, but like Kirby never properly bears its teeth. Like I’m not saying there’s like a secret, super hard tier to this, but there’s definitely a run of stages within the game where it just sort of goes a bit bananas and it starts like mixing like transformations together in interesting ways, or you really have to like lean into those, those like power abilities that I said, it’s like, you know, it will say, you know, okay, well, this bit of the level is gonna really push like your mastery of like ice Kirby. And then you’re gonna turn into a car for like a two mad minutes. And then you’re gonna be like digging Kirby and we’re gonna have some mad digging puzzles. And you’re like, oh, this energy is great. Like this kind of like marathon of like madness. That game’s a nine out of 10. I think because it only gets there towards the end, it’s like a little too sedate for the meat of it. And also there are so many transformations and abilities that they each only really get a couple of moments to like truly shine. I think Mario explores, like in Odyssey, for example, Mario explores those transformations a lot more fully than Kirby explores any of his transformations. But then it is aimed at, I would say, at a younger gamer. And as like a gateway drug, it’s so polished. You know, it’s so charming. Like the idea of, like I think, you know, five, six year old or whatever could probably get into 3D platforming through this. And they’re treated with such respect, like they’ve really put on a show for the younger gamers, which not many people do. I think if this was your first game, you’d leave this going, games are going to be amazing. Like I am so looking forward to playing more games like this. And you almost want to tell those kids, like not all games end as well as this. You know, not all games will go this far to kind of please you. So it’s just a weird thing. I’m like almost more excited for like other people who it’s maybe more suited to playing it than necessarily for myself. That makes sense. Yeah, I’m going to see your rationale there. But not in a, yeah, not in a condescending way. Like, oh, it’s good for kids. Cause actually most stuff people say is good for kids is crap and boring. I will say without spoiling what it is, you know, for people who played the 3DS games and loved like just how hard they went in the final like 10 minutes, this one definitely does that too. You won’t think Kirby’s getting there. Like right up until the end, I was like, oh, I don’t think this is going to end big. Like I can’t really see how this could end big. And then it really did. And I was like, I show Catherine, I was like, look at this, this is so wild. Like how dumb is it that this silly little kind of friendly platformer just really like puts the sort of gas pedal down in the final 10 minutes. It’s like almost worth the admission for that I’d say. Interesting. Well that’s, I’ve asked for this for my birthday from my partner. I thought that would be a nice game to play. Oh yeah. It could pass the pad one as well. Well, you can play co-op. Oh, you can play co-op? Yeah. If you have like a little waddle D comes along. Cool. Yeah. Actually, yeah, that’ll be spot on. So yeah, I’m excited about that. Yeah. That was the other question I was going to ask actually was what’s the rationale for it being post-apocalyptic this game Matthew? Yeah. He just gets pulled through a vortex into like what is sort of our world without much explanation. Again, it’s part of the mad ending to kind of spoil like, it sort of goes a bit Zen-able-y. Which again, you wouldn’t really expect. Kirby games, you play most of them. And like at the end of each level, you fight like a giant tree with a face or like a big monkey. But then you always get to the last boss. And then it starts talking like the most convoluted, like Nomura, a final fantasy villain bullshit you’ve ever heard where you’re always like, oh, okay, what’s this? It’s very odd. Like they go, they kind of go hard sci-fi at the end. Okay, interesting. But what you’re saying is there’s no sequence where Kirby shanks someone playing Hotline Miami 2 on PS Vita. No, there is not. It’s not that. It’s definitely not the last of us of Kirby games. I would love to read, I hope they’ll do like a Nintendo Ask style interview because I’d love to hear the justification behind this particular art style. Because it’s kind of, it’s pretty inexplicable. It’s all the silly Kirby enemies, like the little bomb throwing guys and like the dogs and you know, all the quite kind of abstract characters from the traditional Kirby games, except they’re in like, you know, what looks like the refinery from the start of Final Fantasy 7. What, like the Mako reactor? That is pretty wild. Yeah. Because the background is sort of semi-photo realistic, but then it’s full of like star blocks and like floating plates of curry for you to eat and things. Okay, interesting. That is kind of bizarre. Yeah, it’s odd. It’s a really odd game. I think that, that sounds good. That’s like, you’ve got me even more sold on it at the end there. Yeah, if you want like, it’s basically the art style of The Last of Us, except there are like giant floating donuts everywhere. Which I think Naughty Dog were gonna go for. Yeah, the follow up to Last of Us Part III, little bit lighter. Okay, good stuff Matthew. I will definitely play that. I’m excited to see all this hard sci-fi shit at the end. That’s- I mean, yeah, I don’t want to over-egg it, but it’s harder sci-fi shit than you’re expecting, that’s for sure. Kirby just sees like a monolith that makes kind of like opera sounds and then like goes through a stargate and rapidly ages, dies in bed. There may be a flesh monstrosity involved. Oh wow, so it turns into inside at the end, amazing. Well, you’ll see. Okay, wow, what a tease. Like, how can you at home not want to play this game now, listen to that, that’s exciting. My next game, Matthew, is an older pic. I’ve been playing a fuck ton of Monster Train on the Switch. Now, do you know this game? Played like an hour and a half of it to kind of get my head around to see what the deal was and I was like, oh, it’s a cardy game and I’m not very good at these, so. Yeah, it’s interesting. So I had previously bought Slay the Spire on Switch because I think it was back when I was on PC Gamer. Evan, the editor-in-chief, was massively into like this emerging deck builder genre, which sort of like has popped up in the last five years or so. They’re like single-player card games basically, where it’s like, you know, you play a bunch of cards against like a computer and then there’s kind of like a slightly RPG-ish structure where you’re kind of going up this map and you’re choosing which of two paths you want to go down and there’ll be little story moments and you’ll get currency to spend and new powers and that sort of thing. It’s kind of rogue-like structure so you can see if you can get to the end or not. Inscription was also a kind of riff on this, at least the first part of Inscription was. So it’s become like fairly familiar genre, I would say, and it’s not an uninteresting one. I don’t know if Darkest Dungeons like this as well. I think it maybe is, but I’ve not played that, so I can’t say. But Monster Train is the one that I’ve got massively into because I played Slay the Spy and I found it way too hard for me. It was just like a depleted, kind of like diseased, battered man by the end of it, and it didn’t feel super empowering. This game, I think, is a lot gentler because within about, within like a half a day of playing it, you’ll probably have finished a complete run or what you think is a complete run. And actually, there is like a final area you can only reach by fulfilling a certain set of parameters, and that’s how you properly finish it. But I think this really works in terms of structure. So I’ll just explain what the game is. You pick this kind of like a base class, like a certain, which will kind of like define the style of cards, a bit like picking an element in the Pokemon card game, I guess. I’m afraid I don’t have loads of trading card game knowledge to draw upon here. But let’s say you pick these fiery demon guys, right? And then there’ll be like a secondary card class you can pick too. And you pick these green sort of like healing people. So you’ve got a mix of like brutality and kind of like, you know, sort of melee attacks. And then also you can do some healing, some support class stuff as well. And basically you’re in this train going to hell and you’re just trying to sort of get there before the angels can stop you. So it’s a little bit goth in that respect. What this basically comes down to is you kind of navigating these layers, getting closer and closer to hell, trying to sort of like stop your trains, kind of the fire burning at the center of your train from going out after it takes too much damage from these angel enemies that come and attack you. And you do this by deploying cards, like friendly cards on these floors of the train to try and stop the enemies from progressing up the floors to the fire to destroy the fire and end your game. So basically, yeah, this comes down to like, you play powerful enemies on the bottom floor so you can try and stop the enemies as they come in from progressing upwards. But then you have to strategically kind of like distribute the different cards across the different floors to make sure that if they get past your first wave of enemies, you can at least take them down on the second floor. And the kind of like what they give you in terms of toolbox to help with this is like, you’ll have some enemies who have like stacking abilities. They’re like by placing this card here, you’ll double the aggression of different enemies or different friendly cards on this floor. So their attack will go up. And then you’ll basically, it becomes like this kind of exciting maths game where it’s like, what can I play to make the most exciting explosive numbers to stop these enemies as they arrive on the train? And like, when you see it all pop off, it’s really, really satisfying. Slotted into this RPG like structure where you’ll do a battle, then it’ll be like, you’ve got two paths here, do you want to go buy some new kind of like magic base cards, or do you want to upgrade an existing card, or do you want to get rid of a card from your deck because it’s not very powerful and you’re sick of seeing it in your hand whenever a new turn comes up? This kind of thing. Quite hard to make it sound exciting on a podcast, I’ll be honest. But, yeah. How much stuff like actually happens in the round, like you’re not just placing this stuff at the sort of start of the round, right? It’s not just like a tower defense. It’s got some similarities to that, but how do you mean, exactly? So you’re saying like you’ve got this hand of cards and you’re trying to calculate how to do as much damage as possible, but are you making like live decisions like in the game based on like what happens or? Well, it is turn-based, so you do have to wait for your next turn before you can react. Oh, okay, sorry, I missed that. No, that’s fine, that’s fine. Like it’s a turn-based game, so you’ll see the enemies, you’ll deploy them. It goes, you know, they’ll, they always attack first, unless you, unless you pass. Yeah, sorry, in my head, I have, to spoil what it sounds like, I have actually, I have actually played this. And in my head, yeah, I’ve just remembered placing a lot of stuff there. I couldn’t remember if you just sort of sat back and watched out whether you were screwed or not. I forgot I had that more turn-based thing. Plus it is like, it is tactical, so they’re kind of like, the enemies are sort of like all lined up, and then you’ll always attack the enemy at the front, unless you’ve got a, let’s say one of your cards will say, oh, we’ll let you select which enemy you attack from the row of three. And so what that basically comes down to is, let’s say they’ve put a super defensive card at the front to take loads, to absorb loads of damage, but at the back, there’s an enemy who can do an absolute fuck ton of damage, and you do not want him going up a floor. You might be at a place like, let’s say like this deadly plant card that will drag an enemy forward from the back to the front. So when all of your cards attack, you’ll take out the enemy with the more powerful attack ability rather than the one with the defense. So there’s loads of different maneuvers you can do like that basically. So it’s not just you put the card down and watch it all pop off. It’s like all these cards have different abilities. And it’s like, how do I best combine these abilities to make the most satisfying maths happen? And like, it is like, it is really, really exciting. I think partly because the visual effects are really nice and it kind of zips along at a good pace. It is quite empowering as well. Like it doesn’t feel like it’s always battering you. Do you start every run at like zero? Or is there any like permanent upgrades or permanent stuff you keep? You do get new cards that you unlock as you level up. So they, each of these kind of classes has like a different deck, basically, and you’re adding to that deck as you upgrade. So you do have more cards to draw upon, yeah. And so your tactical kind of like armory is basically growing as you play. Cool, that’s good. So even though you have to start again, it doesn’t always feel that painful. I think as well, what’s really interesting is that the optional final area, I’ve not reached it yet, because it’s actually like, it requires you to take on this currency that sends the difficulty up. And you have to take on, I think like up to 100 of this currency. And by doing that, you unlock the final bit. But if you want to chicken out, you can just not take the final currency, wrap up your run and then just be like, oh yeah, I did it, I finished the game. And I think that’s why I’ve kept playing, because it doesn’t kick your ass too much. It’s like, well, we’ll let you scale this to have the experience you want, but you’ll always feel empowered. You can just watch the monsters batter each other on the train and have a good time. And that’s why I like this. I think it’s like one of the most perfect Switch games I’ve played as well. If people want to play at home, it is on Game Pass. You’ve probably heard about this game anyway. It was pretty acclaimed. Play it on Game Pass, but then I saw that the Switch version was discounted. I thought I must have the Switch version. So I grabbed it on there. It’s spot on for that, comes with the DLC as well. So, oh, it’s so good, Matthew. It’s so, so good. That’s been one of my big gaming addictions this year. So, yeah. So what’s next up for you? Did we want to talk some Elden Ring? Yeah, okay, because I think we’ve got some interesting updates for the listeners here. I don’t know how much more you’ve been playing. Like, I know that I’ve been sort of bombarded with it and I kind of, I’ve taken to judging myself against where social media seems to be at with it now. Right. Because for a long time, you know, all the talk was just, oh God, Margaite and Godric, what a nightmare, what a nightmare. And it was like, oh, okay. And then I saw a wave of like people hitting the boss of the magic school and complaining about that. But then it seemed to go quiet and I’m seeing a lot of people talk about stuff I just haven’t got to. And I don’t know if it’s the end of the game or not, but everything sounds quite end gamey from people’s chat. So I don’t know if everyone wants to skip to the end or what. I’m currently stuck. This happened one time before. When I got out of the first area in the kind of south and then headed west, I felt like there was a noticeable jump up in difficulty. And it took me a while to get my foot holding. But once I had it, I could sort of do most of the stuff in that area or enough of the stuff in the area that I did like the next big dungeon with the boss. And I did like the smaller dungeon in the area with the boss and was feeling pretty good about myself. But I’m now back at the stage where I’m trying to push into a new region and I’m finding it very difficult. So I’m kind of heading east into the sort of decayed lands. I can’t remember what it’s called. Is it Kaled? Yeah, that’s right. I mean, tonally, it’s way more oppressive than what had come before, which is kind of amazing that, you know, it was already pretty impressive. It wasn’t Kirby and the Forgotten Land up until now. But it’s kind of like, you know, remember that horrible poison sort of swamp? Well, how about this land, which like everyone’s got the plague. And you’re like, great. I don’t know how much you’ve gone, I’ve gone into this area, but it’s patrolled by these like giant dogs and giant birds. Yeah. But like really scraggly looking things. They look like kind of cursed puppets, I think. They’re like sort of tatty. You can almost see like the skeletons underneath them. I think they’re quite blood-borne-y in my head. The kind of ascetic of them is a bit more like decay and rot and plague and illness. Maybe that’s why I’m making that association. But I’m just finding them as the common enemy. I think that’s what’s making it so hard to get a foothold because like basically any enemy I encounter is going to really kick my ass. And there’s no easy wins, which you do rely on in that game. Like in most areas, there’s something where you’re like I’m, you know, I have a pretty good feel for this particular enemy type or this particular cluster of enemies. I can beat them again and again, maybe do a bit of grinding. Psychologically, I can feel better about myself because I know there’s a place I can go to and kind of win for a bit. And I’ve just found nothing like that in this area. Like everything kills me. Everything is like a fight to the death and leaves me so kind of broken if I do win that I’m never in the mood to go and repeat it. Right. I have felt this a couple of times before, like I said, when I went into the other area. If anything is going to stop me from like making progress and playing it, it is that feeling of, ah, I’ve not had a win in long enough. And the wins in older areas don’t really cut dirt for me anymore because the runes they give me are too low. Like I’d have to grind them so much to make progress that it feels like, not cheating, but it almost feels scummy to go back and use this powerful character on this place. I just can’t find where this character is meant to be in the world is what I’m getting at, I guess. Right, right. Yeah. So, Kaelin actually is the location I thought was an end game location in that episode we recorded. Right. And then some listeners in the Discord were like, has Samuel learned yet that that wasn’t even close to the end game? And I was like, yeah. That’s the tutorial. Yeah. And so, because I got teleported there, I was completely freaked out by it, because you start in these mines, you work your way out, and then there’s like this blood red sky, and then like there’s a giant dragon off to your left, and then some other motherfucker off to the right. And then like this black rider came after me, and I thought I’ve been chased by an actual Nazgul in Mordor, and this is like, this is rad, but also really scary, because it’s gonna kill me in one hit. But I did actually explore the whole place. Like I actually went around and found all the points of grace, and I thought, well, one day I’ll come back here and I’ll have a foothold of like where to go and stuff. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so I just, I stayed alive, just, you know, Taurid obviously can just move away from all the enemies. That’s the saving grace in this game, is that like that horse will save you, save your skin so many times. You can just kind of stay alive, even when it’s like out of your league in terms of difficulty. But I feel like if I get off the horse in that area, I’m doomed, like wherever, I’ve got to be on that horse or it’s death. Right, yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting. That sounds like then there’s quite a big difficulty jump between Evil Hogwarts and Kaleid as locations. Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. But to the point where I’m like, is this right? Because there has been, I think there is a correct order to things in that game. And there is a sense of progression of difficulty. And the leap here, I’m just like, am I really meant to be riding past all this stuff? Like, is that the correct answer? That doesn’t feel right. Like it feels like I’m not engaging with anything. That can’t be, that can’t be right. Unless I’m just like my particular build, very boring strength character was well suited to like decking wizards in this magic swamp. And here maybe like ranged magic would be better. And that’s how it’s balancing itself. Like certain things are gonna do better in certain areas. I don’t know, but it’s, I haven’t played it for a while. I must admit. Being completely honest, I have hit a wall with it as well. And I think it was, I think honestly, the social media factor is kind of a thing. Like it’s a bit, there’s a bit, there’s like a suffocating amount of chatter around it. And like, I know people now have just gone ahead and finished it and stuff. And I think I get this game sometimes. I obviously I threw 24 hours at it in like seven days. That’s a lot of, for me, that’s a lot. Like I don’t always play games in that fashion. I’m a bit more of a player one or two hours of a game person. But this was like, you know, oh God, I got so into it and then I kind of just needed to cool off a little bit. And now I’ve been kind of poking at it, but it’s like, it’s not completely clicking in the way that it was. Like, it’s definitely still kind of, you know, I find it majestic and I’m excited to finish it eventually. I might just need to mute Elden Ring on Twitter, which is a tragedy because there’s some great memes out there, Matthew, but like, what can you do? So yeah, I think that has weighed on me a little bit. It’s like, oh, I kind of skipped a week and then I feel like I’m quite behind now and I’m not in a mad rush to catch up, you know? So yeah, I kind of get it, buddy. It’s not just you, you know? Oh, good. I feel, yeah, I feel bad because, well, not that bad. Like, disappointed because I was on such a roll with it and it was like, yes, this is clicked. I can do this. This is the one I’m gonna do. This is the one I’m gonna do and now I’m less sure of it, but I’m sure I’ll pick it up again. It doesn’t help that I’ve also had to like review Ghostwire and Kirby. Going from Elden Ring to Kirby is like wild. Like, it is the exact opposite. There is no game on Earth more different from Elden Ring than a game where like, you know, Kirby can inhale a vending machine. That is pretty different, yeah. Matthew, I think there’s someone at my door. I’m just gonna go grab it. This is where you’re like, oh shit, it’s the Black Rider from Caelid. He’s at my door, fuck. Oh dear, he found me. I thought I’d gotten away, but how predictable. He managed to transition from the game to the real world. He’s like, where’s your horse now, motherfucker? Much like Kirby, he has found his way out of the video game and into our world. That’s why they’ve got something in common, Matthew. I’ve got to ask for the benefit of our listeners, because you obviously have a very cool day job, but you fitting these games in personal life-wise, how are you finding doing this freelance alongside it? Because those are some quite chunky games you’re playing at the same time. I’ve been lucky, actually, for all the discourse recently about how no one ever has time to review games. I had Kirby for a month, which was amazing. So I’ve just been chipping away at it in quite a organic an hour here and there, and it’s quite a nice way to play it. And yeah, Ghostwire, because it’s not, you know, 20 hours is still a chunk of time, but I’ve had it for like a week or so. So I had a couple of weeks with that to kind of chip away at it. I’m quite lucky in that, you know, being married to a games journalist who also has to play lots of games and is very busy with work. We’re often quite antisocial when we go off and we can spend a week, weekend, day, each just playing something, you know, respectively. So that’s how it works. I’ve just not seen any of the Oscar films. That’s what’s paid the price this year. Normally, I’m quite on top of my films, but at the moment, like, not really. Not even Nightmare Alley? You’ve seen that piece of shit? Have you seen that piece of shit? I hate that film. Yeah, I’ve seen that. It’s on Disney Plus now. Yeah. Oh, I’ve got to own up. I may have watched the Ben Affleck erotic thriller. You were there, like, at midnight, as soon as it unlocked, you were like… Midnight drop. Was it good? No, it’s terrible. Oh, okay. Is it like, I imagine it’s not that sexy. It’s not. It’s also very odd that he ended up in a relationship with the actor, because they kind of hate each other in the film. Like, they’re not very sexy together. They had not very good chemistry because of the nature of the story, because the nature of their relationship in the story is like really fucked up. So, yeah, it’s quite odd. I think it’s one of those weird pandemic things that happened, you know? Yeah, I think everyone just got really excited that like this incredibly horny film is going to like save, like revitalize the secretly beloved erotic thriller genre of the 80s and early 90s. Yeah. But it hasn’t happened. No, I mean, it doesn’t help that it got dropped onto like Amazon Prime, like, you know, just out of nowhere really. Yeah. But yeah, yeah, RIP, the erotic thriller. Yeah, we all secretly like those, don’t we? The first hour of Basic Instinct isn’t a complete disaster. What’s like an actual good one? Like, I don’t actually think that many of Adrian Lyne’s films are that good. Like, Unfaithful’s quite a bad film, I think. Yeah, I quite like City of Love, the Al Pacino film with, oh, what’s her name? We didn’t think we’d be talking about this on the podcast, to be fair. No, no, we should, we should, no. God, we’re not a horny podcast. Well, we’re not, we’re describing them objectively in a very sort of like, Yeah, I’m not like, hover, hover, hover. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Ellen, Ellen, not Baskin, is it? Oh yeah, yeah, I know you mean, yeah, Barkin, Barkin. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good film. There you go, Sea of Love, available on all good sort of VOD services now. Okay, so the last game we’re gonna discuss, Matthew, then we’ll get to actually quite a fuckton of listener questions. I think people will like those. Also, how funny is it and quaint that we call them reader questions in all of our documents still, and like on the podcast, like, that’s nice, isn’t it? We still think we’re in magazines, bless us. I thought I’d talk about Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy again, because I did talk about us on the podcast previously. It was my, I think like my eighth or ninth choice for Game of the Year for 2021. I only got to squeeze in six hours of it before that episode, so I felt like I didn’t quite do it justice. I’m now quite near the end, and I’ve paid like loads more of it, and I have like, I have more detailed takes, but the main thing I wanna say is, I think this game is Naughty Dog levels of good, like almost across the board, particularly in writing and characterization. In terms of like environments and like level types, it’s occasionally that good, not always though. It has some more kind of like rote, slightly less thrilling sci-fi locations, sort of like metal interiors and- Ooh, my favorite. Slightly dull spaceship locations that aren’t all that I would say. These are like flashes for the box. Metal interiors, slightly dull spaceships. And those offer a little bit of like filler, I guess. It is a fucking long game, this, for what it is, which is actually, you know, I think something in its favor. But to those out there now who have an Xbox and Game Pass, or even on PC and Game Pass, it’s on there. You can just go play this now as part of your subscription, which is amazing, I would say. And I feel like this game has not found the people who it should have found. Like, I don’t feel like I ever saw the response to this that it really deserved. And I feel like if everyone who played Uncharted played this, they would probably love it. So yeah, that’s the thing. I think in terms of what I said on the podcast previously, I do stand by it. Like, I think it is like a better take on these characters than the film versions. It’s got a bit more substance to them. You spend more time with them, so I think that helps just in terms of like, you know, understanding them more. And you just come to appreciate them over time. And there’s so much contextual dialogue in this game that brings them to life. Do you think you need to be big into the Guardians of the Galaxy to dig it? I don’t think so. I think you need to at least be open to the idea of what the dynamic of those films is. A talking raccoon. If you’re not into a talking raccoon, don’t play this game, I would say. Good advice there. But like, if you can tolerate the vague format of, look at these wacky people on a spaceship. Oh, look, they’re like a family because they don’t have their own kind of family sort of thing. If you can just about get along with that, if you can swallow it in any way, shape or form, I think you have the capacity to love this game because it has all of the kind of like, interplay between characters and attention to detail that you want from, you love in those Naughty Dog games. Like you love in the sequences in Uncharted 4 where you’re driving through Madagascar or whatever. And like Sully, Sam and Drake are just chatting. You’re like, I just fucking love hanging around here. This is great fun. It has that vibe. It helps that you have a few locations that are non-combat locations like Nowhere, which is a location from the film, a big kind of Blade Runner-y outer space location with some NPCs around. That stuff makes the universe feel nice and big. It allows it lots of time for nice, quiet character moments where you’ll see like Drax, the big beefy dude who talks very literally, just staring into like this kind of like, basically what is a physical manifestation of the end of the universe and talking about grief and stuff. And like, it addresses that really, really well. And it has like some quite subtly done permutations in terms of the storytelling. I missed, I was gutted about this. I missed an entire sequence where you do like karaoke with some alien guy. And I missed it because I pissed off Rocket Raccoon too much and he fucked off in a sequence where he needed to be there. And my partner was telling me about afterwards, he was like, yeah, it’s a really strange sequence. You get pulled into this bar and there’s this dude there that you do karaoke together. And I was like, oh, I fucking missed that. And I was gutted. I was like, I cannot believe that something that good was optional content. So it’s quite subtle how this stuff’s locked away. Matthew, I remember you played it a bit when we chatted about in that Game of the Year episode. Did you manage to get around to finishing it or getting any more of it done? No, it’s high on my to-do list though. You know, I did enjoy the tone of what I played. Wasn’t mad about the combat, but like I feel like that kind of isn’t really why it exists. Yeah. And yeah, I was into it and your enthusiasm for it as well, like is, yeah, like a big badge of honour for it. So I will definitely give it a go. Yeah, I think you will dig it. I think the other thing is to say that like the combat, like you say, is not perfect. Like a lot of it is geared around Peter Quill’s like elemental abilities you get. So selecting those and kind of like having various effects around like, you know, ice, fire, lightning, all that stuff. And chaining that and using those to kind of like put status effects on enemies and then getting like, you know, the different characters to combine their abilities. It has spectacle, but not depth, I would say. And like, it’s not perfect. But then I don’t think like the What You Got, Dog Games were perfect at this either. So I think it’s fine that it kind of cruises by on that. And it has these exciting moments where you’ll give like a pep talk to all the other guardians and they’ll go out there and kick ass. And then there’s some musical play and stuff like that. And it just, it’s really nicely calibrated around the dynamic of those characters, rather than starting first as a combat game, then working backwards, I would say. So those are my takes on Guardians of Galaxy, Matthew. A lot of people have said this game is good, but I still don’t think it’s enough. I think this game like would be universally adored if more people played it. So I’m surprised there’s still not more of a kind of like groundswell of love for it. Any thoughts? Maybe there’ll be a second wave now it’s on Game Pass. Oh, surely, surely right. By the way, in the background of this podcast, I just bought an Xbox Series X. They’re in stock in Amazon. And I just thought, do you know what, I’m gonna go play fight and fight. Oh my God, what an exciting live update. Yeah, I just, someone in our Discord posted that they’re in stock at Amazon. Then I left it for an hour and thought, well, if they’re still in stock in an hour, then I’ll get one. And they were, so I thought, fucking yes. Shadows of the Dam, 4K is happening, baby. In the background, while we were recording this, I clipped my toenails. Which is more exciting of those updates? Only you can decide. Very, very different energy. Indeed. So Matthew, we’ve got some, like, list of questions here to fire through for the end of the episode. Yeah, I think we can just, there’s quite a few, but I thought we could just power through them. I think so, yeah. So I’ll read out this first one, yeah? Yeah, go for it. This is from imgtr63 on Discord. You know who you are, dude. You listen to podcasts every week, and you seem like a very nice guy. Hope this isn’t too ridiculous a question. I was listening to an old Future Mag podcast, Xbox World. It was the year Wii U was launching, and they mentioned a rumor that Nintendo would rename the Wii U before launch. One of the hosts chimed in that a certain Matthew Castle was so confident it wouldn’t happen that he claimed he would change his own name to whatever it would be called if it were to happen. Obviously, Nintendo stuck with Wii U. If you had to change your name to a video game console, what would it be? Wow, deep cut Matthew Castle reference there. Matthew, what are your thoughts? What would you change your name to if it was a video game console? I mean, most of them just don’t sound like names and are very unworkable. Like, if you call yourself Xbox Series X, it’s like a real pain in the arse to write on forms. Like, Vita is quite an easy to set, like, that sounds like an, it could be a name. I guess it’s, it rhymes with Peter. You have to go with PS as well, surely. You have to be called first name PS. Well, if you put PS. Vita, it sounds like you’re a pretentious and you’re putting your initials at the start. PS. I am PS. Vita Castle. Please, it’s PS. Vita. Yeah, it kind of works. Yeah, okay, that’s quite a good rationale. Yeah, you could just say, oh, where does the name Vita come from? You’re like, it’s Eastern European. Actually, I don’t like to talk about it. Yeah, because a lot of them sound just like robot names. Like 3DS is not a good name. Yeah, this is what I was thinking about. It’s like, it’s quite tough. People could only refer to me as Mr. Jaguar. I’ll say, there’s a family divorce that I don’t like to be called my first name, so only refer to me as Mr. Jaguar. That’s what I think I would do. I also debated whether I’d go with first name Neo, second name Geo. I thought I could maybe make that work. I’d say that Geo is short for George or something. I’d say Neo, second name Geo. It’s like a shit Bond, James Bond. I like that. The shittest, I would argue. Okay, good. We’ve done that one, Matthew. I hope you’re satisfied by the stupid answer there. Do you want to read out the next one? This is from John Cheetham again on Discord. They’re all on Discord. Sega decided to spin off one of the Yakuza minigames into a full title and put it on the Switch. Which one would you want it to be and why? This is controversial, right? But I don’t think I’ve played a single Yakuza minigame I like. I know it’s got a lot of them, but that may be Mr. Jeff’s idea to get deeper into them than I did because I did kind of fire through the story elements more. I thought it might be nice, right? If Sega did like one of them sort of like old game compilations, but the entire framework was, it was Kiryu in a giant arcade and you walked over to the machines to play them. Now you could still have the games in a long list if you can’t be bothered to do that, but I like the idea that he would like stop playing the game then pass comment on each one. That is like something I would dig. What happens if they framed it because they recently shut down that arcade? What happens if it’s like the last night of that arcade and it’s Kiryu walking around just enjoying like remembering the good times? That’s fucking rad and you have like basically a massive spread from across Sega history. It’s like, yeah, I used to play that back in the 80s when I was like a new Yakuza man in Yakuza 0. Yeah, that’d be rad. But I suppose like I thought you could do the karaoke one as like a persona style music game. Yeah, there’s a, you know, there is the dancing game in in A, which I don’t think is deep enough to be like a rhythm game in its own right, but you could maybe open it up. I must admit, even though it’s a bit shady, I kind of like running the hostess bars in Yakuza 0. The whole kind of like staff management, then you’ve got like the mini game where you’re trying to match the right member of staff to the punters and get them to like spend money and then you have to drop in and you have to sort of help them answer questions right so that they kind of, you know, read the room and things like that. That requires quite a lot of the main Yakuza games to work because you also have the stuff where you like recruit them out in the real world and that’s probably a bit much. But I like how a couple of their big management games I think have the kind of the scale to them to be like quite good standalone games. What about the mission where you have to protect the fake Michael Jackson, whatever he’s called, Nigel Jobson or something, from like fake zombies, Matthew? Could that be a stretch down to a whole game? While that quest’s funny, I kind of hate those missions to find the combat. Anything where I have to do like timed combat in that game quite stressful. Yeah. What about the Sexy Beetle fighting game? Like, the one time I played that, I was like, no, definitely not. Yeah, I think I start, I think like kind of karaoke in a persona dancing all night style thing, like that would work. But otherwise, yeah, the theme Sega Arcade collection, I think that would be amazing. People would really dig that. Good. So next one, Matthew, from Scientologist on Discord. Again, if you want to join our Discord, just go to Twitter. You’ll find it in our profile. I have a very simple and exciting question. How come Samuel and Matthew seem to prefer their full first names, no Sam and Matt? I don’t think either way sounds better or worse, but as a person who lives with a Matthew and Matt, he’s got the Hue in brackets there. You have to really see it written down. It always catches me hearing the full name, as if I do that to the one who lives with me, he gets annoyed. So, yeah. Do you have a reason for this, Matthew, why you like being called Matthew and not Matt? At school, I was in a class with three other Matthews and they were all Matt, so I’ve always been a Matthew from that. If people ask, I ask, Matthew, I don’t really care, to be honest, but if you ask, I’ll say Matthew. Yeah, people ask for me and I say, I don’t mind and they genuinely don’t believe me. So I told this story on Twitter the other day, but I just had a frontier, I had an assertiveness course. Right. And the first thing I was asked by the person running the course was, do you prefer Sam or Samuel? And I went, either one’s fine. And there was like a beat and I just went, that’s not very assertive, is it? Oh, did you get a laugh? He loved that. He was like, yeah, I bowled him away. It was great. I felt like I wanted to leave the call at that point. It’s that George Costanza thing of like, I’ll leave on a laugh and then like, my reputation will be established. So yeah. But I genuinely don’t mind. As long as I’m not called Sammy, obviously I call myself Big Sammy on this. Only I may call myself that, but I don’t have a preference really. I used to have an art editor on NGamer who called me Matty. Oh God. I didn’t mind it because I was like, oh, I’ve been accepted by at least one member of the team. But what if they confuse you with that place that does terrible delivered breakfast and bath Matthew? That’s my kind of concern. Matty’s Cafe. Well, this was way before that existed so it was safe, but I kind of like that affectionate thing. The one I have to watch out for, because my brother’s an Alex, but I call him Al, if I’m ever working with Alex’s, I slip into calling them Al very quickly because of my brother, which is very informal. Yeah, I work with an Al and an Alex, so that’s actually fairly easy to remember, but yeah, it’s hey, that’s, I don’t really mind, Samuel, Samuel again was, I only write down Samuel because there was like three Sams in my class, much like Matthew, so I just had to… You’re the only Sam I know who’s a Samuel, who I call Samuel anyway. Yeah, there you go, very beautiful. And I like calling Matthew Matthew because as people know I always go, Matthew, at the start of the podcast. I don’t look like I’m, Matt feels a bit too cool for who I am. Yeah. Plus I was kind of like wary of people giving you too many bad nicknames as well at future. So I was like, well, I’ll just call him Matthew and it’ll be fine. So did I have bad nicknames? I don’t know, like, you had a few people would call you Castle sometimes, I thought that’s a bit familiar. I don’t know. Yeah. Thank you for getting cross on my behalf. Yeah, there you go, that was a very thrilling explanation there. Is this one of yours to read, Matthew? I think it is. Yeah, oh, it’s a long one. This is from Sarah Finnox on Discord, a question mostly directed at Mr. Basil Pesso, that’s me. Apologies for its length, feel free to cut it down. I haven’t done that, so full disclosure, you’re about to get a long question. Have you any insight or thoughts on Nintendo’s reluctance to offer a dedicated virtual console service in relation to treasured games, games stuck on older consoles and forgotten classics? This obviously comes off the back of their recent announcement. I unearthed my Wii U from storage recently and found I had 10 GBA titles, a few DS. Games and had Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask on VC for my Wii. I would love to be able to play these on a current Nintendo console and would gladly purchase them there for $5-10. Where does the reticence come from? Nintendo, barring the PS2, seem to have the largest nostalgia factor going in video games and are currently ignoring it for a strange drip feed subscription service. What are your thoughts? Where do you see this going moving forward? Will Nintendo ever make people happy in relation to how they handle their older titles? I think this is actually in relation to the Wii Store closing, Matthew. Oh, that makes sense. I don’t know. It’s weird how Nintendo’s reputations change because I would say for years we celebrated them as people who did have older platforms in mind. Definitely from, you know, in terms of DS having a GBA slot and Wii playing GameCube games and things like that, you know, I think they went from being top of the class to suddenly like painted as villains for not wanting to support an online store forever. I think a lot of stuff is tied, you know, people seem to just think Nintendo can make like anything happen and they forget that a lot of these games they don’t own like the rights to, you know, that a lot of stuff we don’t see in Virtual Console or the Switch Online Service is because it’s tied up with dead companies or the licensing has got mad stuff going on with it. I think the SNES and NES Online Services are both pretty interesting in terms of the games they offer. Like they have a lot of the classic first party stuff you’d want, but they’ve also got some like quite mad third party stuff that hasn’t been on Virtual Console before. Like it’s a lot more interesting and niche than people give it credit for. It’s not just Virtual Console SNES again, you know, there’s some quite strange things which I can’t name any of off the top of my head. But whenever I go in there, I’m always like, why the hell is this here and not this thing? And actually, I kind of like that about the online service. So I don’t necessarily agree that they’ve like forgotten lots of stuff. The problem with Nintendo is like, it’s not a problem. I think it should sort of be admired is that they value their games forever. You know, they think they still have value and they don’t want to ever devalue them by just giving away everything for free. Which is where I think the drip feed comes from. I don’t think the pace of the N64 and I don’t think the N64 offering on Switch Online is particularly tasty at the moment. I think they could speed it up and do a lot more. But generally, like, I don’t sort of object to a company feeling that their games are valued and that they can still control the flow of them that way. Like, that doesn’t seem outrageous to me. What we’ll say is, I feel like they’re at the point now where they need to have one unified storefront that stays the same for all of their future hardware. In the same way that, like, it’s not like you buy a new PC and Valve’s like, oh, we’ve got to change Steam now and none of your games work. Definitely in the console space. I think, like, Xbox has now set the tone for that. If it works now, it will work forever and that’s our commitment. Either that or you just have to be very frank about it out front. Every time you buy something, the Switch says, we don’t currently have plans for this to be an eternal store. Yeah. It’s like, it’s that thing of, as well, like, you don’t know what Nintendo’s next concept will be. Like, they don’t just make consoles, they make concepts, consoles around concepts. So, you never know, they might do another, like, double screen thing or something just kind of, like, wild and unexpected, so you can’t be totally sure that the next thing will just be another handheld that you can play your stuff on. You just don’t know. But my preference is that I won’t have to buy Xenoblade Chronicles, you know, Definitive Edition again on another system for another 40 quid in, like, five years. Like, I’m hoping that we’re the days that are behind us, but I guess we’ll see. In terms of retro stuff, I’ve got, I imagine that that same cycle will continue with them doing it a completely different way each time there’s a new console. I don’t think that’s going to go away any time soon, but who knows? They seem quite committed to this Nintendo Switch online expansion pass, so I’ll continue to enjoy that as a member of Matthew Castle’s family. So next question. Greetings from New York, from Western New York State, hours closer to Niagara Falls and to NYC. My question is, how much do you know about your listenership? You can be damn sure that you’re locked up with the fans of video games and also unreliably open Meat Tent’s demo, but do you have any sense of the geographical reach of the pod? Or other interesting demographics? Thanks and congrats on the Patreon decision. I’m happy to have a way to help support you from both of them afar. You represent nearly everything I now know about Bath, UK Games Mags and Renny’s, so thank you for that too, I think. That’s from Lucretius on Discord. So, I know more about this than Matthew, because I’m a good guy who looks at stats loads, because Matthew’s got more to do with his life, which is completely fair. I know quite a lot, so we’re primarily UK-based audience. We know what apps they use. They seem to listen to other UK Games podcasts too, which isn’t a massive surprise. You always see those in Spotify algorithm recommendations. I think a lot of people listen to the IGN UK podcast or TCGS or other bits and pieces. They mostly use Pocket Cast, the app, which is a very good app for podcasts, Spotify and Apple podcasts. The biggest opportunity for us is a US audience, because when I worked on games sites, the audience is primarily US, and I feel like, how can you get a UK Games podcast in front of more Americans? That’s something I think about, I guess, in terms of demographics, but those are quite boring answers. Do you have any thoughts on this? I only included this one, because I thought, oh yeah, that would be interesting to know more about. Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything particularly zany in there, but good to know. I could have just asked you in private, rather than dragging it into the podcast. Well, I don’t mind. I quite like being sort of transparent with stats around the podcast, because it’s my data and it’s not data from companies I work for. I get quite excited about sharing it. And it’s not horrible data. It’s nice to be involved with something which actually has decent sounding data. Yeah, that’s true, for the time being anyway. So why don’t you read the next one, Matthew? This is from NecroBastard on Discord. Pod question, obviously. What would ruin your favourite game series for you? Or if you’d rather not think about that, what has ruined a favourite game series of yours in the past? Yeah, so I’ve got two answers to this one, Matthew. First up, I thought about Mass Effect Andromeda, which, you know, it’s tough to keep kicking this game because it has so much shit from people and it’s not as bad as people say it is. But I would say that that’s like an example of like boring side quests, rougher writing and characters kind of infiltrated Mass Effect and that was enough to spoil it, I think. You realise what a delicate balance the original Mass Effect games had. But I think in a larger sense, frequency of sequels I think is something that ruins franchises. So one example I have of this is this is a very specific example, but Onimusha, I was very keen on that on PlayStation 2. But I think it died very early because they squeezed out four main installments and two spinoffs inside five years. And I don’t think it was treated with reverence in the way that like Resident Evil was, for example. You know, not that that doesn’t have its own kind of like bad spinoffs too, it does. But now it’s totally dead. And I remember like in 2006, there was a slightly naff entry called Dawn of Dreams that came out and it was kind of ignored. And then the series just died after that. And I thought it was a real shame because it should have had legs on Amoosha. So that’s one for me, Matthew. But yeah, so I think that’s it. Frequency of sequels, then just like when the execution just dips slightly and it doesn’t feel the same as it used to. Those are my ones. How about you? I wouldn’t say like outright ruined, but there was definitely a period where I thought Ace Attorney was on the ropes a bit after Shittakumi wasn’t involved. But then obviously it came back with Spirit of Justice, which is just such a banger and one of the best ones that I was like, okay, this team can definitely handle this series. The thing I love about Nintendo games broadly is that Nintendo kind of do their own things and don’t seem to sort of sway to like popular trends. Like I would be, you know, sad if like Nintendo felt the need to like bring in a Dark Souls resource management into Zelda or something, you know, I would be sad to see Zelda try and copy trends and Nintendo try and copy trends more broadly, which they don’t do. I wouldn’t want to see like when people sort of do like real world crossovers and they get like influencers in games or like famous people, you know, like NAF celebrities involved with games. I’d be sad if like any of my favorite things did that, like when they kind of pander to like social media trends, that kind of stuff as well, I think is a bit grubby. Yeah. If you do it, it just has to be tastefully done like anything. And I don’t think just jamming a celebrity cameo in there for the sake of it is being done well. So yeah, that’s kind of a good, good take. Last question here, Matthew, from Balladeer on Discord, who I accused of light mischief frequently in that Discord, which I think is accurate. Hi gents, hope you’re having a good one, where one can be day game sandwich or whatever. A question being discussed on the Discord right now, in your experience, does writing for websites and writing for magazines teach new or upcoming journalists different skills? And if so, what are they? I mean, the big difference is one of space and timing. I think people need to be quicker online, but they also don’t necessarily have limitations of writing for the page. I’d say those are probably the defining factors in terms of writing style and what you end up doing. The few times I had to write for online, when we went to E3 and they’d be like, you have to write some stuff for the official Nintendo website while you’re at E3, that was part of the deal. I was not very good at that. I don’t write great copy very quickly. I’m pleased with my copy, but it does take time to do. Talking about this now seems mad because the idea of a young and upcoming journalist through print just doesn’t really happen. Feasibly the last in-house hires or magazines could have happened. So I think this depends on what you end up doing. I can’t say that all writers have the same opportunities I did. But on PC Gamer I learned how to pitch advertorial content to publishers, like video series and things like that around major games that are kind of like Facebook series and stuff. But the idea is editorial driven, so they’re good and not just come up with by people who don’t really understand the material. Even though there’s a firm separation of church and state on that stuff. I worked on events, of course, I worked on a UK consumer event. I learned a lot from doing that. That’s probably quite an unusual one for people to work on. But I know people at Repop do that as well, of course. Like Catherine works on curating EGX panels and stuff. So that’s a good experience because that’s something you can take into another job and be like, hey, I’ve done this before. And people are like, oh, they understand what games events are. That’s good. You know, SEO, social media skills, PC gamers, social media followings are like of millions and millions. To be like, complete transparent over the years, I’ve gone for a few different community manager jobs and been kind of annoyed and never really go anywhere with them because I felt like managing a Facebook page with three million likes and scheduling content for the weekend and stuff and being conscious of messaging was very close to what a community manager does around a game. But I don’t think people necessarily make that leap when they’re hiring, at least companies I’ve been for in the past. This is quite a few years ago now. So yeah, stuff like that. I think I got to turn into a bit of a jack of all trades around that stuff. I wouldn’t say I’m a massive expert at any of that, but I’m pretty well versed in all of it. And I think that’s what working in publishing gives you is quite a broader skill set than you think it is. It’s not just I’ve written for a magazine and now I go write for another magazine. It’s like, well, maybe I’ll move into copywriting, maybe I’ll, like, you know. Oh, is that how it’s meant to work? Yeah, you know, or like you, Matthew, you have, like, gone down a path of video editing. You know how to do that now. You didn’t know how to do that on You’re an NGamer. So like, you know, you are an expert at that. I don’t know how to do any of that stuff. You edit this podcast much better than I do. This is a Matthew edited episode and they’re like, we take it in turns. So I guess like the even numbered ones are Matthew episodes, the odd number ones are my episodes so you can compare and contrast like the skills there. But Matthew is much better than me. So yeah, that’s that’s kind of my answer to that. I hope that’s helpful. But yeah. So I don’t mean to be too gloom about magazines also, but you know, I sometimes find like it’s just when I started, it was feasible that you might work for a magazine one day if you’re outside. But now it’s like, just the numbers are not in your favour. And on that cheery note, let’s end the podcast. So you can follow us at Back Page Pod. You can follow me at Samuel W Roberts. What are you on social media, Matthew? MrBattleUnderscorePesto. And we’re going to launch our Patreon on April 1st, I think, barring any disasters. We’ll see how it goes. But you’ll be able to back us at £1 and £5 tiers. £5 will get you an extra podcast a month. If we reach a certain threshold, you’ll get a second podcast a month. So that’ll be fun. You can have up to six or seven pods a month in total from us, depending on how it goes. Yeah, there’s lots of unanswered questions there for us to figure out. But I think it will be good. That’s the core offering we’re going to go with. So Matthew, next week is the Kirby episode and I’ll see you then. It’ll be good.